Hello there, this tutorial is the making of one of my latest scenes entitled "Old Alley." This is my first making of tutorial, and I hope to create some more along the years. I will take you through all the modeling, texturing, lighting, and rendering. Here is a render of the final scene (scaled down from 800x600).

Modelling

Let's start off with the modeling, it was quite simple. The original creation of this scene began when I was actually doing light tests with VRay. I started out with the natural basis of creating the main structure first (the wall and floor) to begin the process. Here is a wireframe shaded view of the scene.

The wall was created from a standard box and converted to an editable poly where I made cuts within the polys. I actually had to remake the wall a few times to make the window correctly. I used the compound-boolean action for the small encaving near the central right (next to the drainage pipe). I cut some polys on the left and used bevel for the window.

The ground was also quite simple, created from a plane primitive and edited for the manhole and water, then I slapped on a turbosmooth modifyer on it. The next few things I worked on included the pipe (created from a renderable spline) and stairs, other "larger" details which would be obvious at first glance.

Most of the other objects were poly-modeled, including the skatboard, apples with crate, soda cans, the drunk man, and the other details. Here are some closeups of the small objects.

Plants

Some of the plants were created in 3dsmax while the others were made in OnyxTree. The tree was exported to 3dsmax and completely textured in the material editor, along with the small green pot-plants. The dead-looking plant (in the orange pot) was created in 3dsmax.

Lighting

Now to continue, let's go on to the lighting. In my opinion, lighting your scene is very important right after you finish modeling the main section of it, I would recommend doing this before you go onto texturing. This was also very simple and straight-forward. With all my day-time exterior scenes I only have one light source (the sun) which in this case as usual, was a target direct light with an orange color and blue shadows. To get a good angle I had to do a few experimental lighting positions, and I didn't want to use another lightsource for this scene. I decided to create an object that would seem to be in front of the camera (such as a large wall, somewhat blocking the sunlight coming through). This was my first attempt at this type of lighting, and the end results were surprisingly better than what I expected.